Peanut butter and other nut butter spreads are very popular to consumers. In particular, consumers desire a sweet, flavorful spread. To this end, attempts have been made to include honey, molasses and other more viscous sweet ingredients in nut butter spreads. Current methods for incorporating these ingredients into the nut butter involve mixing the sugar and honey at the same time into the nut paste, which may or may not contain other seasonings and/or stabilizers. Unfortunately, sugar solids and honey can increase the viscosity of nut paste dramatically. At high concentrations, such as 10% sugar and 5% honey, the texture of the mixture becomes dough-like or cake-like instead of being the desired smooth liquid paste. Such a mixture is very difficult to process mechanically and pump through pipelines. As a result, commercially-produced nut butters such as honey roasted peanut butter typically only contain a small amount of sugar solids (around 2%).
Attempts have been made to address this problem. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,903,311, Billerbeck et al. describe a method for incorporating honey into a nut butter spread. According to Billerbeck's method, roasted peanuts are mixed with sugar and salt to form a dry peanut composition. The peanut composition is milled with peanut oil to form a milled mixture. The milled mixture is heated, and heated honey is blended with the milled mixture to produce the desired sweetened butter composition.
Although Billerbeck's method maybe suitable when the amount of sugar is limited to 5 wt. % or less, as disclosed in the '311 patent, the present inventors have discovered that increasing the amount of sugar in Billerbeck's method can produce undesirable results. In particular, it has been found that sugar accumulates in the dry mixer and, as the relative amount of sugar increases, it has a tendency to caramelize in the mixer. The extraneous sugar, salt and peanut dust enters the motor, and the caramelization of the sugar can cause the motor to seize, thereby requiring that the mixer be shut down and cleaned. As the ratio of sugar to peanut dust increases, caramelization is more likely.